


what you've become

by qwanderer



Series: Fallen!Gabe [5]
Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Fallen Angel Gabriel (Good Omens), Introspection, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-23
Updated: 2020-03-23
Packaged: 2021-03-01 02:00:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23287420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/qwanderer/pseuds/qwanderer
Summary: Gabriel looked for an escape. “I’d rather hide it,” he said. “Isn’t there a way to hide it?”“Yeah, you could wear a hat. Sometimes there’s only so far you can go with the shifting. So, sunglasses.” Crowley gestured to himself. Then he pointed to Gabriel. “Or, a hat.”“Hats are not. Not my look,” Gabriel said with a horrified stutter.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Series: Fallen!Gabe [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1463686
Comments: 8
Kudos: 92





	what you've become

“You look as if you’re feeling better,” Aziraphale said.

Gabriel nodded vaguely.

“It’ll come back,” Crowley said in an offhand manner. “The hunger. The drive to cause trouble.”

Aziraphale, who was sitting next to him on the sofa, rubbed his arm in a consoling fashion.

“How do you live like this?” Gabriel asked.

“You find ways,” Crowley said.

“Lucifer’s answers to my questions were vague and unhelpful, too,” Gabriel said into his tea. It wasn’t really accusatory. If he were being completely honest with himself, he would have admitted it came out a little desperate.

Aziraphale tutted sympathetically. “It can be hard to explain to somebody who is accustomed to living as an angel,” he said. “It took Crowley centuries to convey it to me as well as he has.”

Gabriel grasped his teacup hard and focused on keeping what peace he’d found for as long as he could. “Try me,” he said through his teeth.

“You find situations you like,” Crowley tried. “I like cutting people off in traffic and listening to them swear. Gluing coins to the pavement. Watching people try to pick them up. Little moments of human frustration entertain me, and feed the ol’ demonic soul. But for the really deep stuff? To scratch that itch that you can’t quite reach yourself? You need someone who knows you. And you know them. And you can get under each other’s skin in all the perfectly terrible little ways that only two people who really know each other can.”

Aziraphale turned to him with slightly pursed lips. “It’s really quite nice of you to take the time to explain this to Gabriel,” he commented with a tiny smirk. 

Crowley wrinkled his nose and shoved Aziraphale away gently. “Shut it, you,” he replied. “You’re enjoying his discomfort as much as I am.”

At this, Aziraphale looked mildly affronted.

“There, you see that?” Crowley said, gesturing between himself and Aziraphale. “That’s the good stuff.”

Gabriel was still getting used to his new senses, but he’d felt something in those interactions. Something that might be described as similar to having one’s fur gently rubbed up the wrong way, if one had fur and knew the sensation, which Gabriel did not. 

The phrase that came to Gabriel’s mind was ‘ruffled feathers.’

“I see,” he said, frowning thoughtfully. “How do you get to be… that way with someone?”

He was afraid Crowley’s answer was once again going to be frustratingly vague. 

“Well, I got incredibly lucky,” Crowley said, making soppy eyes at Aziraphale again.

Well, that was  _ worse _ than frustratingly vague. That was  _ clearly _ unhelpful.

Gabriel suddenly remembered hearing that Crowley rarely ever took off his dark glasses where anyone could see, and wondered if he had left them off now just because he knew that soppy gaze bothered Gabriel.

Then he wondered if perhaps that action was more helpful than hostile. Annoying Gabriel in little ways.

Being a demon was  _ confusing. _

“No one in Hell really got my style,” Crowley continued, “so they sent me up to Earth. Three whole people to annoy, and all of them wide-eyed and innocent. Took all my tricks to get the humans to do anything even vaguely bad. Not very satisfying. And then there was the angel.”

There was more of the gazing.

“Already riled up about some little disobedience he’d just slipped into on his own. Barely had to nudge him to get him all flustered again. And he nudged right back, but it never stopped him from being kind.”

“Oh, hush,” said Aziraphale, cheeks pinking up. “You give me far too much credit. I was horrid to you, sometimes, and we both know it.”

“Never too much,” Crowley argued. “Never anything like hell. But enough, and that was important.” He turned to Gabriel again. “I liked bothering Aziraphale because he never minded enough to push me away for it but he was never more than a little mean in return. Just the right amount.”

Gabriel frowned. “Is that all this is? Is that the trick? It can’t be that simple.”

Crowley shook his head.”No, you have to know the other person well to do it consistently. Without pushing them away.”

Aziraphale looked at Crowley fondly. “And our partnership, our… Arrangement… it became more.”

Crowley chuckled. “Love without complacency and discord without hate. We argue, and we love.”

“A very human balance,” Aziraphale commented.

“You do things the way humans do them a lot, don’t you?” Gabriel asked. The concept still disgusted him, and he couldn’t keep it out of his voice.

The other two just smiled.

“She loves them,” Aziraphale said, eyes flicking up.

“Lucifer is jealous of them for a reason,” Crowley countered, ducking his head meaningfully.

Gabriel thought about that for a moment, and then scoffed. “I don’t understand why. Everything down here is messy and… and mixed up.”

Aziraphale’s face lit up, gesturing around them. “It’s delightful, once you become accustomed to it. Humans have come up with so many marvelous ways of combining things that should be jarring but instead end up… inspired.” A blissful smile crossed his face, eyes half-closed. 

“What food are you thinking of, angel?” Crowley teased.

“If you must know,” Aziraphale said, rolling his eyes, “I was recalling a book I recently came across in which Sherlock Holmes teams up with a young Jewish theology student.” He glanced at Crowley. “Humans do indeed have a taste for unlikely partnerships.”

Crowley laughed. “That’s us,” he said. “Our thing? Not quite what either demons or angels would make together, and we’re both glad of it. Demons have significant bothers. I’m not sure what angels have.”

“Colleagues,” Zira said, eyeing Gabriel. “And I’m not sure I don’t prefer what demons have.”

“Our Arrangement was somewhere in between,” Crowley said. “Now it’s definitely better than both.”

“But it still does have aspects of each,” Aziraphale said.

“You don’t have to have what we have,” Crowley told Gabriel, “and I’d be very surprised if you could manage anything like it. But you need to find something. And I mean this in the nicest way possible,” he said, rolling his eyes, “but. Find someone else to bother.”

Gabriel did not want what they had.

Not… specifically. What worked for them would not work for him. But that ruffled-feathers feeling, he had to admit, if only in the privacy of his head, was intoxicating.

He blew out a long breath. 

“Okay. I can do that,” Gabriel agreed. “But it’s not actually what I came here for. I… need help. With something else.”

Crowley and Aziraphale both turned to him, eyes interested.

“What kind of help?” Crowley asked.

Gabriel felt they must be joking. It must be obvious. They were going to make him say it as part of their revenge.

He shook his head tightly. Then he gestured to himself. Pushed out the words.

“Look at me! How am I supposed to go around on Earth getting my assignments done, looking like this? I can’t figure out how to do the thing you all do where you look mostly human when you want to.” He gestured vaguely at Crowley.

Crowley’s eyes widened. “Ah, yeah, that’s a trick,” he said. “Not the easiest one, either.”

“I can do it,” Gabriel said. “Just tell me how.”

“Yeah,” Crowley agreed. “So. First things first. It  _ was _ pride, wasn’t it?”

“You said you could tell!” Gabriel protested. 

“Might have exaggerated,” Crowley told him. “You’re a mess, you know? Little bits of lots of things. But I need to know what She told you.”

Gabriel clenched his jaw.

“Pride, or a mix?” Crowley asked, yellow gaze drilling into Gabriel. 

“Does it make a difference?” Gabriel asked. “Do you need to know?”

“I don’t need to know,” Crowley said slowly, “but you need to be able to say it.”

“How does that make sense?”

“You need to know that about yourself. Accept that you’re proud.”

“But it’s a sin.” Gabriel wrinkled his nose.

“Yes, you aren’t pure and holy anymore,” Crowley said in a bored voice. “Get over it and figure out what you are and how to live with it.”

“Easy for you to say.” He gestured to Crowley, that polished exterior.

“Easy for me to say?” Crowley shifted, fangs growing long and dripping, the horrific face he showed to the human who’d tried to stop them from entering the former hospital. He turned that horror on Gabriel now. “Easy? I had a mouth full of poison. I had dangerous questions and I let Lucifer answer them for me. Crawled along after him like a pet for just too long.” His voice was a low hiss as he went the rest of the way snake, slinking over and draping himself heavily across Gabriel’s shoulders and coming at him from the other side. 

“Wrath and rebellion, sloth and inattention. Not a pretty combination, eh? Not pretty at all.” 

Crowley slithered down and away from Gabriel, then, towards Aziraphale. 

“Until I saw that it could be beautiful,” he continued in a gentler voice. “Doubting. Setting aside one’s duties. Waffling until the last possible second because you can’t figure out what you’re supposed to be doing. Sometimes it’s that stuff that needs doing. And sometimes it’s lovely.”

He turned back to his human form, arms curling tight around Aziraphale, whose expression was one of fascinated curiosity with just a bit of a knowing smirk.

“I learned to make it look good,” he told Gabriel. “Pride? Pride’s easy to make it look good. But you have to accept it before you can mold it.”

Gabriel opened his mouth to respond. It hung there for a moment before he realized he didn’t know how. He closed it again.

“I don’t want to do that,” he said. “It’s a sin.” This was a statement which would have been straightforward in the past, but was now fractal with implications and emotions that spread out as he heard himself say it. He watched that play out in his mind’s eye for a moment.

Crowley just shrugged expressively.

Gabriel looked for an escape. “I’d rather hide it,” he said. “Isn’t there a way to hide it?”

“Yeah, you could wear a hat. Sometimes there’s only so far you can go with the shifting. So, sunglasses.” Crowley gestured to himself. Then he pointed to Gabriel. “Or, a hat.”

“Hats are not. Not my look,” Gabriel said with a horrified stutter.

Crowley looked at him, assessing. “No, yeah, you’re right.” He held out a hand in a half-shrug. “So?”

Gabriel sighed deeply. “So I need to accept it.”

“Yeah, accept what?” Crowley raised his eyebrows.

“My, uh. My thing. P- the thing She told me.”

“Uh huh,” Crowley said, unimpressed. “It’s just a word. Come on. You can do it. They’re all just noises.”

Crowley seemed unruffled by all of this, until Gabriel noticed that his knuckles were white where he was gripping Aziraphale’s hand, and the angel was gripping back almost as tightly.

“There are things,” said Aziraphale gently, “that must be said. Questions that must be asked. Otherwise life could never move on to the next thing. It would be the same, always, unchanging. Not alive, but dead. And that would be awful.”

He seemed to be speaking to them both. He was certainly looking at Crowley.

“The universe needs demons as much as it needs angels. Your qualities and actions are not unimportant. But neither are they uniformly bad.”

“Yeah,” Crowley said, and his hand loosened a bit on Aziraphale’s. 

“The universe needs pride, and you can provide that,” Aziraphale continued. “There is a reason for all this, and perhaps not even an ineffable one. Adam is a force for good in the world, whether or not he intends to be. Demons exist for a reason, to give humans a balanced perspective on what options they have. They can be humble, or they can be proud. And either way, they need someone to show them how. Now, I don’t pretend to speak for Her,” Aziraphale said rather pointedly to Gabriel, “but I think you would do a marvelous job of showing humans the appeal of pride.”

Gabriel had the sudden, bizarre sensation that this was the first genuine thing Aziraphale had ever said about Gabriel to his face. There was a warmth in his eyes that Gabriel had only previously seen directed at humans, their books, their food, or a certain demon.

He wasn’t sure how it made him feel.

He preferred the respect, Gabriel had told himself, and it wasn’t entirely a lie. That warmth represented being close to someone else, on the same level as someone else. And it was never what Gabriel had sought out. Gabriel wanted to be  _ above. _

Aziraphale was watching him closely, and when Gabriel had digested this realization for a few seconds, Aziraphale looked him in the eye and gently suggested, “Say ‘I am proud’.”

It tasted so bitter in Gabriel’s mouth. He couldn’t make himself say it.

“Don’t talk to me like that,” he spat instead.

“Why?” Aziraphale asked.

“You don’t get to pity me.”

“Sympathy isn’t pity,” Aziraphale said with that gentle authority he seemed to have in spades now that his fear had fallen away. Gabriel hated that lack.

He gritted his teeth. “You don’t know how I feel.”

“Perhaps not,” Aziraphale admitted. “But I can make an educated guess.”

“Oh, I know exactly how you feel,” Crowley interjected.

Wordlessly, Gabriel turned his narrowed eyes on Crowley.

“You’re so angry. So frustrated.” Crowley didn’t bother keeping that now-familiar edge of vindictive glee off his face. “Well. You should do something about it. Get back at the being that decided your fate. Don’t you want to stick it to Her?”

“No!” Gabriel’s voice didn’t sound as firm as he would have liked.

Crowley chuckled. “I hope it doesn’t take as long for you to be honest about that as it took Zira here.”

Gabriel’s eyes widened. “You?” he asked Aziraphale.

Aziraphale looked prim, but he pursed his lips consideringly, and eventually he said, “She has, from time to time, put me in some very uncomfortable positions, and I have to admit to hoping that I have occasionally done the same for Her.”

Gabriel bit his lip, looking out the window, and then sighed. The truth was messy, but if only this truth would get him through this trial, then he needed to admit to it. 

“She made me proud,” he hissed, “and then She made me a demon because of it.”

The other two were silent, still waiting for more.

He growled, deep in his throat, and then said defiantly at the ceiling, “I am a demon and I am proud. And it’s Your doing.”

He could feel his demon-self shifting, roiling like the surf at the edge of a stormy sea. 

“Ah,” Crowley said. “Now, that’s not bad. You can work with that.”

Gabriel frowned at him, confused. 

Silently, Aziraphale handed him a mirror. 

Gabriel was almost afraid to look, but he did. Gone were the wet, bedraggled jellyfish appendages that made him look like a pathetic fish out of water. Instead, his head was haloed in floating pink, as if he was moving through the sea. Or as if his hair was ruffled by a nonexistent breeze.

“Huh,” he said.

“What you’ve become is not so abhorrent,” Aziraphale said, “if you have it in you to work  _ with  _ that nature, rather than against it.”

Gabriel smiled tightly at him. “I still don’t like you,” he told Aziraphale.

In response, Aziraphale beamed. “And I like you much better,” he said, “now that you can admit it.”

Not answering, Gabriel continued to examine himself in the mirror.

Yeah. He could work with this.

**Author's Note:**

> I've got a bit more material for this series - I think there's one more piece to be gotten out of it.


End file.
